The Phantom City

Mainline? Mainline?

According to the SelectSmart.com Belief System Selector, my #1 belief match is Mainline to Liberal Christian Protestants. What do you believe? Visit SelectSmart.com/RELIGION

Actually, my second option, at 93%, would be closer to where I grew up:

According to the SelectSmart.com Belief System Selector, my #2 belief match is Orthodox Quaker. What do you believe? Visit SelectSmart.com/RELIGION

Link courtesy of Too many topics, too little time, which will be living up to the latter half of its name, as Jeremy pauses for dissertation. Good luck, dude.

Supposedly these are questions asked in the Church of Scientology while people are hooked up to the E-meter. (However, the questions were pulled from the first issue of Radar, so who knows where they came from.) I shall endeavor to answer them, even though I am not currently in possession of an E-meter:

1. Have you ever enslaved a population? Well, no, but if this is to be part of later performance evaluations, I’ll need a measurable. How large a population?
2. Have you ever debased a nation’s currency? I ripped a dollar to make a point one time. Then I taped it back together, but it wouldn’t work in the vending machine.
3. Have you ever killed the wrong person? I haven’t had occasion to choose between people to kill.
4. Have you ever torn out someone’s tongue? They’re slippery, so no. This fellow did it to a leopard, though.
5. Have you ever been a professional critic? Enthusiastic amateur.
6. Have you ever wiped out a family? I don’t think I did it, but I’ve met some families where it would be hard to tell.
7. Have you ever tried to give sanity a bad name? Only by example.
8. Have you consistently practiced sex in some unnatural fashion? Uh, no, I don’t think so. Of course, the questioner could be going off a different list.
9. Have you ever made a planet, or nation, radioactive? Only in my imagination, when I was a kid.
10. Have you ever made love to a dead body? No. If that’s not covered by question 8, I don’t even want to know what the list includes.
11. Have you ever engaged in piracy? ARRRRR!
12. Have you ever been a pimp? No, but I’ve always been envious of the tall-soled shoes.
13. Have you ever eaten a human body? That would have to be a really small body. I’m not the best at cleaning my plate.
14. Have you ever disfigured a beautiful thing? Only in misguided attempts to make it more beautiful.
15. Have you ever exterminated a species? Maybe. A rare spider species, perhaps.
16. Have you ever been a professional executioner? Enthusiastic amateur…of spiders in the house.
17. Have you ever given robots a bad name? I usually have the opposite problem. I know they’re talking about me behind my back, whispering…
18. Have you ever set a booby trap? Yep, also elementary school. Kid was stealing my pencils.
19. Have you ever failed to rescue your leader? No, because I’ve usually put them in that situation, so it’s easier for me to get them back out.

Credit for the meme goes to Will Pfeifer of X-Ray Spex, who does a better job answering than I ever could.

Another modest proposal from U.S. Register of Copyrights Marybeth Peters. This time she proposes eliminating the current section of law that allows musicians to record covers, as long as they pay a fee. She proposes that a private organization set the rules and rates.

Ms. Peters seems to be making this sort of grand gesture a habit.

Link courtesy of the Lessig Blog

Okay, I don’t have a cat of my own to take pictures of, or even a neighborhood cat. But we did just watch Cat People — the great 1942 Val Lewton original, not the Nastassja Kinski version from 1982.

It’s always good when you watch a low-budget film that simply suggests horror outclass a film that has to show every detail. Of course, the original version does have a lead actor who apparently wasn’t paid to show any expression at all.

BTW, I have to credit American Art Archives for the image. They have a great page featuring the artwork of William Rose, who did the poster above.

A 73-year-old Kenyan grandfather killed an attacking leopard with his bare hands by ripping out its tongue. He dropped the machete he was carrying to do so.

Courtesy of Reuters

Pre-1985, at least. The good years of video games.

I am a Defender-ship.

I am fiercely protective of my friends and loved ones, and unforgiving of any who would hurt them. Speed and foresight are my strengths, at the cost of a little clumsiness. I’m most comfortable with a few friends, but sometimes particularly enjoy spending time in larger groups.

What Video Game Character Are You?

Looks like Coingate is turning out to be as much about simple corruption as weird financial schemes using Ohio money. (I really wish it could be more weird financial schemes. I was looking forward to the exposé on the chinchilla farms.)

Governor Bob Taft has admitted he didn’t disclose some golf outings with the central figure in the Coingate scandal, Thomas Noe. While the possibility of free golf doesn’t sound like a big deal — even though it is a violation of the law — the bigger issue is that four top Ohio officials have already resigned because of accepting gifts such as free golf outings.

So, I’m sure we all expect Gov. Taft to do the logical thing and step down, right?

Link courtesy of Talking Points Memo

Let’s say you’re CIA Director Porter Goss, and you give an interview claiming that you have an “excellent idea” where Osama bin Laden is hiding. However, you then claim that America’s sense of “fair play” concerning state sovereignty is an issue when it comes to actually capturing him.

So, how does that work, exactly? Saddam Hussein was such a great threat to the U.S. from 2001 on that we invaded Iraq and are still occupying the country with a sizable portion of our military, but the person who actually ordered the last major attack on our country is safe because of our respect for the nation-state system?

(And, if we have such respect for that system, why does the CIA exist? Are we laying off the spies?)

Well, at least the interview gave me a pretty good idea of the location of Osama bin Laden’s sanctuary. It would have to be in a country where, no matter what, we wouldn’t actively pursue a international terrorist due to our sense of realpolitik and fear of disruption. Yes, ladies and gentlemen, bin Laden is apparently hiding in the Cold War-era Soviet Union.

From The Onion.

“This is no way for people to live,” said Kentucky Family Outreach coordinator Martin Weiss, speaking Monday in front of a half-constructed, five-story Habitrail outside Payneville. “While it’s true that poor Americans need a viable alternative to housing projects, placing them in large, confusing warrens of see-through cylinders is not the solution.”

Frank Furedi writes an article on intellectual/political anti-populism:

The belief that the public is too simplistic or too gullible has led some Democratic Party activists to blame the defeat of their presidential candidate in two successive elections on the stupidity of the people. One liberal activist, Michael Gronewalter, states that “civility and intelligent dialogue are useful tools among intelligent people” but are inappropriate for engaging with the public.

While his point is oversimplified — there is indeed something wrong if a voter can’t be bothered to find out current information about their own core interests — it would be a sad thing if the lesson the Democratic Party took from the last two elections was that voters were too stupid to understand them.

I’m actually interested in the political process, and in the last two elections I still haven’t really understood why I should be voting for the Democratic candidate, rather than against Bush. I don’t recall much, if any indication of how the country was going to get better under the Democratic candidate, so I voted to keep the country from getting worse. That’s not exactly an inspiring choice. (To give them credit, Al Gore had good ideas that he would communicate on occasion, and John Kerry had the moral force and energy for reform, if he would mention where the reform would happen. Perhaps they should have been melded.)

I wonder if this is an inevitable consequence of the running to the moderate wing in a national election. Will the ideas truly be different, or will there just be incremental changes between the two platforms? In other words, would the “No, I have a better idea” moments outweigh the “That’s a good idea, but I would spend more on it” moments? Combine “moderatism” with the idea that big campaign donors are not really interested in a wide variety of ideas, and you are going to get a lot of elections where “people just don’t vote in their own self-interest.” I mean, how can they tell where that is, aside from “Life’s okay now, so I’ll stick with the status quo” vs. “My life’s horrible, so I’ll vote the bastards out”?

Of course, after running on moderate platforms, what happens? The ideology comes out, and you’ve got four years of change based on the political beliefs of the party in charge. Yep, that really builds up trust in the political process.

Anyway, Furedi’s article largely hinges on the EU Constitution process — truly a momentous conflict of ideas, yet one that seems to get presented as if it were a department store merger.